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Resent-Date: Wed,  2 Jan 2008 21:53:27 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: Re: Debian-AI
From: Andrew Dougherty <andrewdo@frdcsa.org>
To: tillea@rki.de
Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:54:07 -0600 (CST)
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> I startet building Debian packages about 10 years ago and in no single
> case I had the impression that this process could be done automatically.
> You might be lucky if you try to package some kind of standardized
> archives like CTAN or CPAN, but I doubt that this is possible if
> you are picking random FOSS from the net.

Though it would be nice, I do not pretend to be able to automatically
package software to the Debian archive quality standards.  However, I
do have tools that expedite the semi-automatic creation of rough
quality packages (see Packager [0]), and believe that certain tasks in
the package creation process can be completely automated to a high
success rate (especially when more "AI" systems are integrated part of
the available tool chain, and the large archive of source packages and
their upstream sources is used as a training and testing data source).
I am using debaux to completely automatically package Perl modules,
and for every package in CPAN would like to attempt to create a rough
quality package.

[0] http://frdcsa.onshore.net/frdcsa/internal/packager/

> > Would there be any interest in a Debian-AI sub-project?
> 
> It sounds like you should think about joining the Custom Debian
> Distribution effort:
> 
>     http://wiki.debian.org/CustomDebian
>     http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/
> 
> If you are using the CDD tools you could gain some profit for your
> users by technically grouping set of packages to takss.  We have also
> automatic tools to document what we just have inside official Debian
> and what is on our todo list like for instance
> 
>     http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio.php
> 
> (Please note that the later URL is just a preview of the web tools
>   that are currently developed and once they are bug free there will
>   be an official announcement.  It's just to give you an idea of the
>   profit you might have if you are building an official CDD.)

I am definitely interested in the CDDs, and think the Comprehensive
Software Ontology (CSO) (which should have formal representation of
software capabilities), along with a tool I am working on for
generating custom distributions based on required capabilities, would
help with that effort.

> Kind regards and good luck for your project
> 
>          Andreas.
> 
> -- http://fam-tille.de

Slainte,
Andrew


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